Are Banks Holding Out?

Las Vegas has gone from 0 to 60 on the home sales speedometer in 3 seconds over the last 4 months. I mostly act as a buyer's agent and can tell you I have a lot of frustrated buyers because the properties they like all have multiple offers on them within 1-2 days of being listed.

Just on a hunch, I ran some numbers on our local MLS this morning. 54% of the single family homes listed are under contract, and I'll bet that over 50% of the remaining properties have multiple offers on them.

In running this by my broker and my business partner, we believe that the banks are holding back inventory. We were told in a town hall type meeting a little over a week ago that there are at least 18,000 bank owned properties to be released in the Las Vegas market, yet out of the 6,000 bank owned properties available in our market, which is 1/3 of all properties listed, less than 2,000 are still showing available. If there are another 18,000 bank owned properties to be listed, where are they?

Las Vegas has become such a hot market that many properites are getting multiple offers, and I mean multiple. Recently, one property has 80 offers on it. I'm sure that was not the only one. Of course, this is now driving prices up. For us, its almost like 2004 but without the huge price spikes.

So the banks have figured out that if they release properties a little at a time, they hope to keep up the demand and increase the prices. Will it work? Who knows, but for now, its still making us write lots and lots of offers.